Quote: (09-04-2018 04:39 AM)Richard Turpin Wrote:
Quote: (09-01-2018 06:42 AM)Parzival Wrote:
I'm not American nor did I spent a great amount of time there, but I work for an American company. What I notice, you guys can correct me, for me it seems that Americans lack the way of long term thinking.
Great hands on mentality, also smart and improve a lot of things. But with Vietnam, Afghanistan the Gulf War, then Iraq and Afghanistan again, there is a lack of long term strategy as it seems.
Well, this reminds me of a quote in the last episode which I'll proceed to butcher and paraphrase;
'China and Russia were better allies to the North than America was to South Vietnam'
The inference being that China and Russia remained allies of the North all the way to the end, but the US basically cut ties and left the South (and it's civilian population) to its fate (even though Nixon had promised to still assist if the North attacks). The US left them fighter planes (with no ground staff) and jeeps (with no spare parts). All useless, whereas the North continued to be well supplied all the way to the bitter end.
This short-term thinking is something all empires are guilty of at some point; they profess to 'look to the future' rather than realise that there is no 'one' future but a number of different possible futures. Or as historian Niall Ferguson says 'the law of unintended consequences is the only law of history'.
I think what people are missing here is the difference between tactics and strategy.
China went in for wave tactics in the Korean War partly because they struggled with the terrain.
The Soviets had a much better history of movement and dealing with terrain and -more importantly- focusing on the wider strategy of a war as opposed to battlefield tactics.
The Chinese and the Soviets hated each other after their split in the 50's.
The Viets hated the Chinese during the 70s and their Chinese proxies the Khmer Rouge.
When the Viets handed back the Khmer child refugees that had been stuck their side and cared for by the Viets during the indo-china war the KR..
..walked them round the corner and chopped them into pieces while they were still alive and cried out on tannoys for all to hear how they were Viet traitors during that massacre (over the children's screams of course)..
The Vietnamese had to stay their side of the border and just listen.
People on here talking about a tough resourceful set of guerrillas defeating a bigger more cumbersome force and at the same time talking about the domestic news in America and the public's response have yet to put 2 and 2 together.
The Soviets deserve credit.
The Vietnamese had all manner of offers of tanks and apcs and field guns and they turned them down.
The Viets and the Soviets saw the real battleground in terms of their strategy as
.....==the US nightly news==
....................-that was where they would win-.
I can't think of one large scale conventional battle that the VC or NV won. Not a one.
The Tet offensive was a tactical defeat for the VC/NV.
All of their attacks were eventually repulsed and all their gains were reversed.
And yet it was strategically their biggest win. They Blew Up the US nightly news.
They won the war right there.
The idea that these rice farmers and jungle guerrillas beat the US in a conventional war is mistaken.
Their generals won by bleeding the US public support for the war back home.
That shows strategic genius.
Reading the theatre of operations as widely as possible.
By contrast the US was too narrow in its appreciation of where the war was being fought.
In another age they could have gone full media blackout Totalitarian mode and just rode through the country smashing the NVA from the air in the North (those little concrete pipe fox holes wouldn't have withstood the bombing the US could have delivered even back then) and wiping out any questionable Vietnamese populations down South.
Not saying it would be morally right in any way - nor that - the US DIDN"T already act in a brutal heavy handed way (on the ground/ from the air) in many ways against a lightly armed enemy.
The point being that the VC commanders kept the US 'swatting flies with sledgehammers' BECAUSE strategically they knew they had an audience in America to play to.
Without the Soviets lingering in the background and the media recording all this footage those sledgehammers would have been redoubled and could have just annihilated (if necessary) most of Vietnam and eventually (in darkness) those sledgehammers would have worked.
No one knows about the massacres the British recorded against the Mau Mau, the concentration camps.
No one knows of guerrillas of Casamance === precisely because there was no significant Senegalese nightly news.